Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Saturday, March 15, 2008 8:08:25 PM
The power bypass kept NASA on track for Saturday night's spacewalk to hook the robot's 11-foot arms to its torso. Spacewalkers have already attached the robot's hands to its arms.
Phil Engelauf, chief of the flight director's office, said everyone on the ground was relieved to see the power problem resolved.
"There was obviously some real concern over the last day or two for getting that powered up," he said.
The shuttle Endeavour and its seven-man crew delivered Dextre -- lying in pieces on its transport bed -- to the space station. It was attached to the exterior of the orbiting outpost on Thursday.
The problem cable is in Dextre's transport bed, or pallet, which the astronauts are using as a staging area to assemble the robot.
The pallet originally was supposed to be attached to one part of the space station and the cable was designed accordingly, said Pierre Jean, Canada's acting space station program manager. The cable should have been updated when officials changed the attachment point, but it wasn't, he said.
Supplying power directly to Dextre via the space station's robot arm circumvented the cable and transport bed.
Jean said the Canadian Space Agency and its main contractor were responsible for designing the cable, but he was reluctant to blame anyone for the error.
"In this case this is not something that was done by negligence or anything like that," he said late Friday.
Earlier in the day, LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, promised a full investigation "to run this to ground and understand exactly what happened and how and why."
The Canadian-built robot -- which cost more than $200 million -- is intended to be a helper for spacewalking astronauts. It ultimately could take over some spacewalking jobs, saving time for space station crews while reducing their risk.
Once it's completely assembled early next week, the robot will be removed from its transport bed. From that point on, it will be powered from its various attachment points directly on the space station.
Endeavour also delivered the first segment of Japan's Kibo lab, a 14-foot-long storage compartment. The $1 billion lab itself will fly to the space station in May, aboard shuttle Discovery.
Five spacewalks are planned for Endeavour's nearly two-week visit, the longest ever by a shuttle.
On Friday, mission managers concluded that Endeavour's heat shield made it through Tuesday's liftoff in good shape and formally cleared the shuttle for re-entry on March 26.
Scrooges and party-poopers alike can whine all they want about what a huge waste of money our space program, or any space program, is for the taxpayer. To them I say: Boooo! Continuing to achieve what was once thought impossible and explore ever-outward into our universe is never a waste. It's in the nature of mankind to explore and push ourselves well past all limitations. Do I think there's more cost-efficient and productive ways of doing this in space? Absolutely. That does not, however, mean we shut it all down when the program under-performs or simply displeases a minority of the country.
Most Americans want a space program and a space program we will have. Don't like it? I don't care. Surely these nay-sayers can find better things to do with their time than gripe about wasting money on NASA. Cut the overspending and stop the chaos in Congress and NASA would be paid for multiple times over. The space program is a shining achievement for our country and all of humanity. We have shown we can go beyond pettiness, shoot for the stars, and hit the target. The representation of such things that our space program provides will always be worth the cost. America must continue to achieve for the sake of achievement.